Water Pollution

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed federal, state, and local efforts to clean up Michigan's Rouge River, focusing on: (1) the overall quality of the river's waters; (2) pollutant sources; (3) the status of cleanup planning efforts; and (4) costs of remedial cleanup efforts.

GAO found that: (1) Michigan's Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) was responsible for managing the river's cleanup; and (2) the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was responsible for ensuring that cleanup activities met legislative requirements. GAO also found that: (1) the river's water quality, which ranged from fair to very poor, severely impaired its uses for fishing and swimming and constituted a threat to public health; (2) discharges of pollutants from overflowing combined sewers, estimated at 473 million pounds annually, were the major pollution sources; (3) planning for the river's cleanup intensified in 1986 when MDNR made it a priority and jointly developed with EPA and local communities a plan to eliminate untreated discharges and overflows and to finance remedial measures; (4) costs to fully implement the plan were unknown, although estimates for partial implementation totalled $1.8 billion; (5) MDNR plans to more effectively use the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System to reduce the amount of discharged pollutants and ensure permittees' compliance with permit requirements; and (6) EPA worked with MDNR to resolve problems it identified in the computerized system MDNR used to assess permit compliance.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: Team: Phone: